If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runnersby Roy Webb. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986, xi+194pp.,
$14.95.

River running seems to be moving into a kind of middle age. Well- established as
entrepreneurs in the recreation, self-discovery, and hell-raising-good-times industry,
those who bounce well-heeled tourists in rubber rafts down fast-moving rivers are now
expanding into river trips emphasizing self-confidence, self-assertion, teamwork, and
other marketable skills of the '80s. I've even heard of river-running companies that
describe their trips as tax-deductible investment seminars so that their clients can write
off their costs (roughly $100 per day plus transportation to and from the river).

Another side to this inventive maturity is the burgeoning number of books that focus on
the history of river running in the U.S., with Utah playing a lead role in all such
discussions--for it was here, on the Green River, that modern river running began.
Starting perhaps with Pearl Baker's biography of Bert Loper (Trail on the Water, 1969),
this self-reflective movement among the white-water gang has included Georgie White's
autobiography Thirty Years of River Running (written with Duane Newcomb) and, most
notably, David Lavender's recent River Runners of the Grand Canyon (1985).

The inaccessibility of the Colorado and Green Rivers, along with the size of their
rapids, has made them among the most popular rivers for recreational river runners since
before World War II. But they exerted their magic long before that, beginning in 1776 when
they were visited by Dominguez and Escalante. They were followed by such notables as
General William H. Ashley and Kit Carson, and--most remarkably--by Major John Wesley
Powell and his nine- man crew, who left Green River, Wyoming, in the spring of 1869 and
managed to float, line, portage, carry, and drag their twenty-one-foot oaken boats through
the entire length of the Grand Canyon.

What may not be apparent to those who have not been on a white-water river trip is the
very sense of historicity that these rivers carry. It's a clichZ among river-running
diehards to talk of how the river constantly changes yet remains the same, but there is
truth here, too. The canyons and rapids and cliffs that we pass on the Green or the
Colorado carry the names invented by Powell and his crew, ranging from the Canyon of
Lodore (named after a sentimental nineteenth-century poem) to the Dirty Devil River, named
after itself. The more adept storytellers among the river guides regale their passengers
with narratives of Ashley and Carson, Fremont and Powell, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, and the early commercial river runners, too: Bus Hatch, Norman Nevills, Bert Loper,
Harry Aleson, and Georgie White herself, with her leopard-skin bikini and her army boots.

Roy Webb's solid history of the Green River adds another volume to the developing
inquiry into the history of these rivers and, by extension, into the fascination that they
hold for humankind. Dangerous, unpredictable, untameable except by dams, difficult or
impossible to use for agriculture or industry, nearly undrinkable, the Green and the
Colorado nevertheless have a lure that surpasses shore-bound understanding. Some of that
attraction is hinted at in Webb's general summary of the early explorers, mountain men,
traders, and surveyors who prowled the shores of the Green and essayed the first
white-water experiments upon it.

The book's most interesting and original segments are the last four chapters, in which
Webb investigates the increasing use ofthe rivers for recreation and adventure, notably in
the 1909 and 1911 trips of Julius Stone and of Ellsworth and Emery Kolb. He also traces
the early technology and techniques that would subsequently allow relative neophytes to
pass some of the most ferocious rapids in the world, have fun doing it, and be glad to pay
for it in the process. He describes the long-neglected Nathaniel Galloway, who thought up
the high prow design still seen in the Grand Canyon dories and who invented the
stern-first, row-the-boat-backwards technique to keep control in wild water. Webb also
traces the post-World War II innovations of Bus Hatch, one of the first to adapt the
rubber pontoons and assault rafts used in the war to Western rivers--a development that
ultimately led to the complex web of permits, fire pans, and porta-potties necessitated by
the increasing number of commercial trips. Webb covers the enormous controversy over the
Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument, which was never built, and Flaming Gorge Dam,
which was.

This is a workmanlike book that tantalizes as much as it informs. What is notably
absent here is a sense of the lives and personalities of the people who have lived along
the banks of the river, who have given to it names, legends, and a host of local
characters. Webb barely mentions the wonderfully named "Green River Suck," the
eccentric hermits Pat Lynch and Amos Hill and Dutch John Honselena, and the ranchers and
homesteaders in Browns Park, Island Park, and other settlements along the river. Nor is
there much about the ranching sisters who moonlighted as cattle rustlers, or about the
dinosaur hunters and the great bone parade from Vernal to Salt Lake City, or about the Ute
Indians, through whose reservation the Green passes. And although he does cover the
achievements of Galloway and Hatch and other river rats, he rarely attempts to communicate
what they were like as people, or why these rivers had such a hold on them. Still, this
book is a valuable summary of the Green River's history and its importance. Oddly enough,
a river that was best known as one of the gathering places of the mountain men may be best
known in a hundred years as the cradle of recreational white water tourism.